daughter, Eleanor Dare, and her husband Annanias Dare. The native chief, who had traveled to England with the original explorers, also sailed back with the colonists.
After Lane’s fiasco with the natives, Raleigh had decided that Chesapeake Bay would be a better choice for a settlement, and this was where the ship was supposed to take Governor White and his party. The Portuguese captain of the ship was first ordered to stop at Roanoke to drop off supplies and check on the men who had been left there, as well as to drop off the Native American chief at his home. The ship arrived safely in Roanoke. While there, the ship’s crew discovered that the natives who had fought with Lane had also killed the 15 men who had been left behind to guard the settlement, and most everything there had been burned or destroyed with only a few bones of the dead men found scattered. It was extremely dangerous and considered uninhabitable at this time due to the ongoing battle with the local native tribe.
During the voyage to Roanoke, the ship’s captain had received word that the Spanish were gearing up to fight England, and he decided that this was a golden opportunity to make a fortune pirating and looting the ships carrying cargo back and forth. He made the decision that he would not take the passengers all the way up to Chesapeake Bay; instead they would be left at Roanoke so that he could return to Europe. Even though the captain was aware that everyone who had previously been at Roanoke was now dead, he forced Governor White and all of the passengers off the ship and onto Roanoke Island.
The passengers scrambled to build some sort of shelter, and White immediately reached out to the Croatan people, who had been friendly with the earlier explorers. He also reached out to the other tribe that had fought with Lane. The Croatan people were friendly, but the other tribe refused to make peace with the settlers.
The colonists busied themselves trying to create shelter and unpack their belongings while the ship’s crew was busy loading fresh water and other supplies back onto the ship.
On July 28, 1587, a member of White’s party, George Howe, set out walking along the beach, looking to collect crabs to cook for that evening’s dinner. As he was walking, he was captured and killed by being shot 16 times with arrows, and then his head was beaten into pieces by the native tribe.
Afraid for their lives, the colonists asked the governor to travel back with the ship when it departed and make his way to England to ask for immediate assistance and reinforcements. This was a risky voyage, as traveling across the Atlantic Ocean in the fall was a very rough journey for ships due to storms and high waves. There was also concern about the Portuguese captain heading into battle and pirating along the way during the trip back to Europe.
Before White’s departure on the ship, his daughter Eleanor gave birth to the first colonist child on August 18, 1587, on Roanoke Island. She named her child Virginia Dare. On August 27, 1587, John White sailed with the ship back to England. What happened subsequently is every father’s nightmare.
Governor White just barely made it back to England, as the captain noted in his ship’s log; they had been lucky to find their way to the English shore. White gathered supplies and resources but could not find a captain who was willing to risk the voyage across the Atlantic during the stormy and choppy seas of the winter months. He was forced to wait, leaving his family and the colonists at the mercy of a long, cold winter with few supplies and a hostile enemy surrounding them.
In spring of the next year, White desperately tried to get back to the colonists at Roanoke. During this time the Anglo-Spanish War broke out and all available ships were being used in the battles. He managed to find two ships, which were small enough that they were deemed unable to be of any assistance in battle. As White sailed toward Roanoke, the two ships encountered Spanish pirates whose crews boarded the English ships and stole all of the cargo. Empty-handed, John White was forced back to England again to gather new resources and supplies. Due to the ongoing war, White was unable to hire a ship until three years later, in 1590, when he managed to get on board with, an expedition that agreed to drop him off at Roanoke.
Three years after Eleanor gave birth to Virginia, her father landed on Roanoke Island to find everyone and everything missing. All traces of the settlement had disappeared. There was no sign of struggle, nor were there any signs of where the group had gone. His heart raced with terror. Were his daughter and granddaughter alive? Had someone taken them? There had been no way to get a direct message to them for the past three years. The colonists had no news source and relied on ships that very infrequently stopped in the area. It’s highly likely that the colonists might not have known about the war that had kept White from traveling back to them. They may have presumed White to be dead or lost at sea.
Imagine how Eleanor must have felt, a new baby and practically defenseless, waiting each day in such dangerous territory, cradling her small daughter while everyone rationed the dwindling supplies. White understood this and more, realizing that his dream of starting the first settlement in the New World and bringing his daughter with him had led to her destruction.
White searched through the entire settlement, and the only clues he found was the word CROATAN carved into one of the trees and the letters CRO carved in a second tree nearby. He had asked the group to leave a sign should they be forced to move further inland and suggested that they use the sign of a Maltese cross carved in a tree should they be under attack and forced to flee for their lives.
Seeing only the word Croatan carved on the tree, his hope was that the settlers had joined the Croatan people, whose chief had been friendly to White. He hoped that they were safe with them where the Croatan people lived on nearby Hatteras Island.
As he asked the ship’s captain to sail to Hatteras Island, a hurricane formed in the Atlantic near the North Carolina coast, damaging the ship. The captain then ordered that the ship immediately return to England for repairs, denying White’s request to sail to Hatteras Island. White returned to England with a heavy heart. By this time, he was out of money. White was never able to return to the New World to find his daughter and granddaughter.
The lost colony of Roanoke remains a mystery to this day. Theories have arisen throughout the years over what happened to the colonists. Here are a few: a hurricane swept over them, destroyed the settlement, and washed all the colonists out to sea; the hostile tribe killed them all, buried their bodies, and destroyed the settlement; the settlers, angry at what they perceived as White’s desertion or death, and now hungry, alone, and cold, set out to live elsewhere and died along their journey, or they left and went to live with the Croatan tribe.
Supernatural explanations have also been raised, including werewolves attacking the group and turning the colonists into werewolves; or as they abandoned the settlement, the native tribes destroyed the camp and cursed it in order to keep others from returning. One theory posits that aliens arrived on the shore and took all of the colonists with them onto their spaceship.
The most plausible theory is that the colonists hung on for a while at the settlement, but as the cold winter blew in, they knew that between the low food supplies, angry natives, and freezing temperatures, their chances of survival were slim. Since White had befriended the chief of the Croatans, most historians believe that they reached out to the Croatans and went to live with them on Hatteras Island. This explains the Croatan message left behind on the tree for White to find.
In 1709, John Lawson, an explorer from England, reported that he spent some time with the descendants of the Croatan tribe, who were now referred to as the Hatteras Indians. This would have been about 120 years after the birth of Virginia Dare. The explorer reported that when meeting the tribe, several of the people had very light skin and gray and blue eyes rather than brown. He reported that he had not seen this among any of the other natives he had encountered in his explorations. They told him that they were of English descent and that they had the ability to “talk in a book,” which meant that they knew how to read.
More than 300 years after
